Word: plays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Playwright Shaffer can write sharp dialogue that is also characterizing, can cunningly create atmosphere and tension. This, linked to a vivid production, makes for a generally good evening that at its best is engrossing. The play has its contrived moments and false notes, and the German-however well played by Michael Bryant-serves too many purposes to emerge entirely right. But in view of England's gulf between classes and generations and often evasive family tactics, there is more than a measure of truth in Shaffer's picture. And with John Gielgud eloquently directing a good cast...
Jolly's Progress (by Lonnie Coleman) concerns a wild, scared, quick-witted young Alabama Negro housemaid who, having been seduced by her employer and sent packing by his wife, finds sanctuary with an enlightened writer. While the writer is playing Professor Higgins to the girl's Liza, the town assumes he is playing Don Juan. Preachers rail, hooded figures threaten, before a ladylike Jolly goes North for further schooling. Beyond some vivid touches by Eartha Kitt, the play has small merit. It is so gagged up with breezy situations, crude stereotypes and comic characters that the racial angle...
...kind of Elegy in a Country Bedroom, an evening-long unburdening of troubled hearts and sluicing of wistful memories. Much of it is honestly evocative and well expressed. A sensitive Henry Fonda and an appealing Barbara Bel Geddes do well by it. But beyond suffering crucially as a play from all lack of movement, Silent Night suffers equally as a conversation piece from overstretching a mood. That bedeviler of the mood piece, monotony, more and more scatters his poppies. Valid feeling comes more and more to seem watered or sugared...
Undramatic though the play is, the final trouble lies less with subject matter than with form. Had Silent Night been not a full play but a longish one-acter, it might have had a special appeal. It could, just long and lyrically enough, have chronicled a meeting and sustained a mood-and with no tossed-in newlyweds, no shaky final scene. Unfortunately, as a one-acter it would not fit the Broadway scheme of things, though as a full-length play it scarcely fits it either...
...attending Ohio State on an academic scholarship with no extras thrown in for athletics. "First come my studies," he says, "and then basketball." Lucas maintains an A-minus average (botany, American history, English), can see so far beyond the basketball court that he has no plans to play with the pros. "I think it's a hard life with all that traveling and living in hotels," says Big Luke, as serious as a sophomore can be. "I want to settle down and get a job and stick with...